THE HUNCHBACK’S PIETY
THE people had long laboured and groaned under the oppressive misrule of Hang Ti, the local magistrate. He was, without doubt, a bad ruler, a man possessed of none of the tenderer feelings of humanity, and one who ground the faces of the poor for his own advancement. Under his mal-administration illegal taxes had been super-imposed on salt, likin barriers established where none should exist, the gaols were crowded with those unfortunates who would not submit to his further extortions, and the whole land cried out for redress.
At last the long-suffering poor took into their own hands the only means they possessed of calling the “Son of Heaven’s” attention to their pitiable condition. An insurrection was fomented and quickly blazed into serious rebellion. Villages were sacked, whole districts laid waste, and soon accounts of these doings reached Peking. By swiftest messengers a mandate signed with the “Vermilion Pencil” was conveyed to Hang Ti, ordering him to raise troops forthwith and to crush the rebels, at the same time enjoining all peacefully minded persons to abstain from nervous excitability, but rather to pursue the cultivation of all the virtues, more especially those of thrift, energy, and the study of the classics.
Hang Ti’s troops, with their pay long in arrears, no stomach for the fight, and most of them secretly in sympathy with the rebels, were routed at the first engagement, and then the whole province was given up to bloodshed, rapine, and excesses of every description.
A second Imperial Order soon followed the first summoning Hang Ti to the capital, whither he hastily repaired, having first laid his hands on as much of his ill-gotten wealth as he could conveniently carry, hoping thereby to bribe the palace underlings, and so mitigate in some measure the punishment he deserved.
On his arrival in Peking he was not permitted to enter his Imperial master’s presence, but was presented by an official with a handsome silk scarf, a polite hint that he might hang himself and so save his person the greater indignity of decapitation. So Hang Ti passes out of the story, and an energetic officer named Yeh Lok reigned in his stead.
Yeh subdued the rebels with a firm hand, and in three months the district, although somewhat depopulated, was reported to the “Son of Heaven” as being “Happy, contented, and at peace.” Yeh next turned his attention to the administration of his district, and found that there utter chaos reigned in every department. The prisons were overcrowded to a disgraceful extent, and the majority of the unfortunate prisoners had not even any crime registered against them. Yeh’s heart bled for them: this shocking state of affairs had to be at once remedied. The idea of keeping people in prison for indefinite periods without trial revolted Yeh’s every sense of what was right and just. He ordered them, therefore, to be taken out in batches of forty and to be beheaded. Forty each day till the gaols were empty and cleared of all persons wrongfully incarcerated.
Lok Hing squatted in tattered blue cotton garments behind a tin of pea-nuts at the roadside; an old umbrella afforded him a grateful shade from the blazing sun, and his well-ventilated and roomy clothes allowed of his scratching any portion of himself with the least possible effort. He was a man of no ambition, content to earn a few cash by selling pea-nuts and spend his life in a philosophical melancholy. As he sat tapping the tin with an elongated finger-nail and droning out a mournful eulogy of his wares, To Tao, the hunchback, passed.